On a late spring morning, before the Assiniboine River had thawed into its full ribbon of green, volunteers from across Brandon gathered at a converted lot behind an old grain elevator. They came with burlap sacks, bakery boxes, and the careful energy of people who had been taught to look differently at the citys detritus. At the center of the activity was Maya Sigurdson, sleeves rolled, boots caked with compost, explaining how a three-meter pile of browns and greens would become soil in months, not decades.

Sigurdson founded RiverRoot Collective in 2018 with what she describes as a stubborn, practical optimism: the conviction that organic waste could be the seed, literally and figuratively, of a more resilient Brandon. She is not an activist who traded nuance for slogans. She is a farm kid from the Perry area who studied environmental science at Brandon University, then spent years working with municipal waste systems before deciding the most effective work would be to stitch together the loose ends of the local landscapebusinesses, schools, Indigenous communities, and small-scale farmers.

"We treat waste as a resource," she says, pausing to scoop a warm handful of finished compost. "But we also treat people as partners. Thats the only way this scales."

The scale she means is concrete. RiverRoot runs a weekly pickup program for cafés and restaurants in downtown Brandon, organizes composting hubs in apartment blocks, and operates a greenhouse that uses recovered heat and compost tea to grow seedlings for municipal plantings. During harvest season, RiverRoot delivers flats of native prairie grasses and pollinator plants to the citys parks department and to backyard gardeners. In 2024 the Collective partnered with a local brewery to pilot an anaerobic digester that captures wasted grain and converts it into fertilizer and energy credits.

None of these projects exist in a vacuum. Sigurdson frames each initiative as a node in a network. The compost pickup keeps organic matter out of landfills, which has a small but measurable climate benefit; the finished compost enriches soils on low-input farms in the surrounding RM, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers; the native plantings support pollinators that improve yields for market gardeners who sell at Brandons farmersmarket. The work creates jobs: RiverRoot employs eight full-time staff and a rotating roster of apprentices, many of them young people learning land-based skills and small-business practices.

One of the most striking elements of RiverRoots approach is its partnerships with Indigenous communities. Sigurdson consulted with local elders and land stewards to integrate traditional knowledge into wetland restoration and seed selection. At a recent school workshop, Anishinaabe youth taught their classmates how to identify medicinal plants that were being replanted along a degraded creek bank. "Its not about us coming in with solutions," Sigurdson says. "Its about making space for knowledge thats been here for generations."

Residents notice the difference. "Our neighbourhood feels like its breathing again," said Lila MacDonald, a City Centre resident who volunteers with RiverRoot. "We used to see so much bagged yard waste go into garbage trucks. Now I can bring my kitchen scraps to the hub and watch them come back as plants and soil for our community garden."

The Collective doesnt pretend to be a panacea. Municipal regulations, zoning, and funding cycles are stubborn constraints. RiverRoot has had to navigate provincial waste policies that still favor centralised disposal. Sigurdson describes a meeting with city officials where she spent more time explaining compost thermodynamics than she expected to. "Policy hasnt caught up with common sense," she says wryly. "But its getting there."

There are measurable wins to point to. RiverRoot estimates it has diverted roughly 200 tonnes of organic waste from the landfill since 2019, supported the planting of a three-kilometre pollinator corridor along a tributary of the Assiniboine, and trained more than 60 apprentices through its seasonal programs. Those numbers are useful but incomplete: the fuller metric is ordinary lives changingthe barista who found a career path in ecological restoration, the school class that learned soil chemistry by scent and touch, the farmer who reduced fertilizer costs and rediscovered a diversity of crops that feed both market and meadow.

Looking forward, Sigurdson talks about building a regional hub for circular-economy projects across Westman: a place where residuals from breweries, bakeries, and farms flow into shared processing capacity; where seeds are saved and distributed; where energy that would otherwise dissipate becomes a resource for greenhouses and workshops. She imagines policy levers shifting to support small-scale infrastructure and small farmers rather than funneling everything into distant, centralized systems.

"If you start with soil," she says, "you end up with so much more than gardens. You get community, resilience, and a way to hold a changing climate." That sentence—simple, pragmatic, and a little stubborn—captures why RiverRoot matters. It is not about perfect solutions; its about steady, place-based repair. In a region accustomed to the blunt instruments of commodity agriculture, Sigurdsons work is a proof of concept: that a city the size of Brandon can cultivate a culture and an economy that treat waste as wealth and people as participants.

At the end of the morning the volunteers wheelbarrowed the finished compost to raised beds around the lot. Children dotted with flecks of black soil held up worms like tiny, living exclamation points. The work ahead is long, but the scene felt like the accumulation of small, deliberate decisions that, over time, remake a place.

"Were planting for people wholl never know us," Sigurdson said. "Thats the kind of investment that lasts."